Wednesday, February 22, 2012

CrowdStrike launches in stealth-mode with $26 million Series A round led by Warburg Pincus

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was delighted to announce that I had joined Warburg Pincus,
a leading global private equity firm focused on growth investing, as an
Executive in Residence. So far my time as an EIR at Warburg has been
fantastic. The past few months have exposed me to many new companies and
technologies that really got my creative juices flowing and pushed me
to get back into the start-up game with Warburg Pincus as my partner.

Today, I am proud to announce the stealth-mode launch of my newest venture that I co-founded with Dmitri Alperovitch (CTO) and Gregg Marston (CFO)
– CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is a security technology company focused on
helping enterprises and governments protect their most sensitive
intellectual property and national security information. Utilizing
Big-Data technologies, CrowdStrike is developing a new and innovative
approach to solving today’s most demanding cyber-security challenges.
CrowdStrike’s core mission is to fundamentally change how organizations
implement and manage security in their environment.

Why CrowdStrike:

The seemingly daily barrage of disclosures about companies that have had
their crown jewels stolen in recent years reinforced a key principle
for us – these companies don’t have a malware problem, they have an adversary problem. Many
just don’t know it. Today’s attacks are sophisticated, targeted, and
long ranging in scope. Unfortunately, almost every security solution
focuses on the tens of thousands of pieces of malware, exploits, and
vulnerabilities that are seen in the wild every day. Yet, those are just
the interchangeable and, in many cases, disposable tools that the
adversaries use to achieve their ultimate objective – theft of
intellectual property, trade secrets, and other business proprietary
information.

As many of you know the security industry is building “Maginot-line”
style of defenses – attempting to prevent all adversaries from getting
inside the perimeter of the network or host system. More importantly, a
well-financed, trained, and highly determined attacker will always get
in. More than likely, they are already in. There is no silver bullet
that will stop a determined adversary, so while the security industry
attempts to build bigger fences, the enemy is bringing higher ladders to
the fight. Moreover, the industry continues to focus on the malware or
exploits which is akin to focusing on the gun as opposed to the shooter
committing the crime. The person or organization pulling the trigger (or
deploying the malware) is the one that you ultimately need to focus on.
The type of gun or ammunition they may be using is interesting, but in
most cases not strategically relevant.

Based upon investigations we have led, such as Operation Aurora, Night Dragon, and Shady RAT,
and knowing the limitations of existing technologies, we are horrified
at the amount of IP being stolen and financial damage inflicted every
day. It is evident that we are dealing with economic predators who are
systematically destroying value in countries around the world. Even
worse, we may very well see the enemy engage in destructive and
disruptive attacks designed to take down critical infrastructure or
modify key processes and data in a covert undetectable fashion.

The Missing Link: Attribution & Raising the Costs to the Adversary

Attribution is the key strategic piece missing from all existing
security technologies – providing the answer to the “who?” vs. the
“what?” Knowing who is after your IP is critical in determining what
assets you want to protect and how. Protecting everything is impossible –
you may as well be protecting nothing. However, knowing the enemy is
the first step in the process of determining the priority of allocation
of scarce resources to defend the key assets and tailoring your response
to the Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) of the adversary.
Knowing their capabilities, objectives, and the way they go about
executing on them is the missing piece of the puzzle in today’s
defensive security technologies. The key to success is raising
adversary’s costs to exceed the value of the data they may be trying to
exfiltrate and the only way to accomplish that is by forcing them to
change the way they conduct the human-led parts of their intrusions,
such as reconnaissance, lateral movement, identification of valuable
assets, and exfiltration. Other parts of the operation, such as
vulnerability weaponization, malware delivery, and command and control
can be mass-produced and changed at will with little cost. However,
attackers are creatures of habit and while they are fast to change their
weapons, they are slow to change their methods. By
identifying the adversary and revealing their unique TTPs (i.e. modus
operandi), we can hit them where it counts – at the human-dependent and
not easily scalable parts of their operations.

The CrowdStrike Mission:

As the President and CEO of CrowdStrike, one of the most exciting
aspects of this new venture for me is assembling a “dream team” of
security visionaries to address this important mission and challenge.
Our team is comprised of people who are “big thinkers” that have the
technical prowess to execute and carry out our mission goals without the
encumbrances that face legacy security solutions. Our team of
visionaries are the rebels who believe the current state of security is
fundamentally broken and want to do something about it. More
importantly, these are the patriots who are tired of seeing our
intellectual property and competitive advantage wiped away under the
thinly veiled cover of an Internet address. The recent stories
surrounding Nortel provide a shinning example of how the adversaries can
embed themselves into a multi-national organization for the better part
of a decade without detection while systematically accessing their most
coveted intellectual property. If we sit back idly and do nothing about
these types of attacks, we certainly face a crisis of epic proportions
and economic consequences that we have yet to fully comprehend.
CrowdStrike does not accept the status quo, and we intend to do
something about it. If you share our passion and vision about this
crisis, and believe you have what it takes to join our fight then please
send an email to mission@crowdstrike.com.
We are looking for kick ass coders, consultants, and experts who like
us have been fighting and responding to nation-state targeted
intrusions.

I will leave you with one final thought. The ancient Chinese military
strategist Sun Tzu in his teachings emphasized the need to “know your
enemy”. For if “you know your enemy and know yourself,” he wrote, “you
need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Isn’t it time we apply
these simple time honored lessons in the cyber security battlefield of
the twenty-first century?

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